Do you think you will get any games out of the Steam auction?

From what I can see there is no point in me crafting gems as I have no hope of actually winning an auction with the number of gems I would get.

Does anyone know if this is in place of their regular Christmas sale?

Nope, not in a million years. Even though I've made a bid on a relatively lesser known game, I fully expect that once the auctions start on the 15th, some Steam tryhards running some scripts will just not bid anything until the last few seconds of each 45-minute period, and always outbid whoever it looks like is going to win.

Nope! Not a chance. I did convert most of my low-priced cards, hoping to use them to make booster packs. Turn out those cost a lot to make as well, so I only got half of what I needed. Guess I'll just stay stuck with 300 or so gems. Or sell them. I don't know. Doesn't matter much really. I did start selling a lot of my cards because of this though, as I really don't need the cards or the badges for most of my games. I got two or three games I would like badges for though.

I went crazy with cards a few months back to see if I could make enough money to buy the witcher 1 and 2 when they were cheap (I could). Definitely won't be taking part in the auction aspect of the sale because of it. Probably won't buy anything either.

I go by the rule that there is always someone more hardcore than me. There will always be someone with a ridiculous amount of gems that is willing to spend more of them. I'll just sell all of my cards and stuff for a few pennies and be done with it.

Just checked my inventory. My stuff is worth about 4200 gems. or 7-11 cents per item. I think selling makes more sense. I'm not going to gamble away guaranteed money.

Ironically, the bids were actually a lot lower back when the Auction was totally broken, because everyone was too busy just buying duped gems on the marketplace and transmuting them into boosters I guess? Lots of games were in the 10,000 gem range for their max bid, give or take 5,000. Now it seems like way more bids are in the 10,000 to 40,000 range.

Also, I continue to not understand why all the tryhards are trying to outbid each other on the holiday profile item. Maybe they've just already sunk enough money into Steam that they have all the games they could possibly want to own, so they're trying to get the weird prestige item to possibly sell it on the marketplace later.

People that used the exploit will take everything

I think that there should have been some sweepstakes to make the average gamers able to win in this event .

It won't. They've said the actual sale starts on the 19th.

Also, it's impossible to win anything for me. Almost all games are 10,000+ gems. My inventory is worth 52.

It's pretty much impossible for normal users, there are bids in the hundreds of thousands of gems... I can't even understand how someone can have that many.

Yay, another thing that Steam will have that caters to those who exploit and cheat the Steam service. Thanks, Valve!

Another reminder of why over the last 2 years I've bought fewer and fewer games through Steam itself.

I converted all my shit and got about 7k gems. So far I put money on really awful looking games so I may get something. I can't believe there's 100 people who would want a copy of some broke looking basketball management game.

The market was(is?) flooded with items everyone had but nobody wanted.

I'm not entirely sure, but I assume people just buy all the emoticons and backgrounds in the lowest price range (I think $0.01 - $0.03 is as low as it goes? But don't quote me on that) and then just turn them into gems.

If you buy 100 emoticons for $3, and each emoticon is worth 100 gems, you essentially traded $3 for 10k gems.

@xymox: damn that sounds like a lot of work... you'd have to spend an entire evening clicking stuff to get the crazy amounts people are biding

At least you can turn the useless gems into trading card packs which can later be sold for some coin.

Sweet, I thought this auction was occurring in place of the steam sale. This is the final nail in the coffin, I have no desire to participate anymore. Also, I don't know if its a bad sign but I am having a hard time selling off some of these cards...

I have like 700 gems and bid on Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky. So... maybe?

The bids are going to go down as the auction progresses, so I think I should be able to pick something up towards the end.

I'm assuming when you say

What is a "steam"?

you mean

What is a "steam auction"?

so I voted for that.

As a result of PC issues I haven't been logging into Steam much lately. If it's anything like every other auction service ever it doesn't sound like my thing.

No. The gem prices, even on the low end, are insane compared to how many cards I have (and I have a lot of cards).

If you don't win anything with the gems, do you get anything back? This sounds like a way to clear up people's inventory without them actually getting anything for it. I cleared out my inventory with the currently inflated prices and got about $6. At least I'm guaranteed a game at that price during the sale, rather than trying to bid on one that I probably won't win.

I think the cards are a cool idea and i like the art, but there is nothing the make me want to pursue them. However, tie a deck into an item, or weapon, or something for the game now we have something.

I think this auction thing is a cool idea...but a bit flawed at this point. The "gem economy" is pretty hopeless at the moment - way too much supply.

@thatonedudenick: 6$ is nothing to sneeze at... maybe I should sell my stuff too... I kinda want the badges and emoticons though...

I haven't seen a single thing listed for less than like 10000 gems. I just ended up buying a few booster packs with the 1300 gems I managed to get. I sold a bunch of stuff as the prices had gone up for some cards and emotes too, just kept all that gave 100-200 gems. Plenty of people seemed to pay upwards of $0.15 for garbage which would only yield like 20 gems.

I'm expecting to win two or three games. At least two.

@mb: How many gems do you have and did you buy them?

After looking at how high the auction prices were for games and watching a rise in value for cards and icons, I took this opportunity to completely rid myself of this steam card madness and sold all my cards in the market place. I feel much better now =D

What i've seen, i would need something like 6000+ gems for the cheapest interesting thing on the auction. Notice that there's only about 100 or so items you can get from each auction and there are over 1000+ bidders, the time it would take me, with cards(which give anywhere from +10 gems each) to get an item is ludacris. Valve didn't think about this, but the way the auction currently is, it is not made for someone like me with no gems to get interested in getting gems, rather it's made for people that already have a ton of gem to use them on something other than trading cards and what not. Maybe they'll make something more interesting next year for people that aren't into trading and such things on steam.

I think the whole trading card thing is a waste of time to begin with. If I can't get ALL the cards by playing my games, then I'm not going to barter, trade or buy any others. It's all too much work for little to no return. This auction seems to continue that worthless exercise.

I mostly just used it to get rid of the junk in my inventory by selling it all for $0.03.

The top bids right now are all pretty high but I found that if I bid on some of the less exciting games buried in there I could bid like 100-200 gems and end up in around 15-50th place in terms of bids. Since there's a hundred of everything I actually think I'd probably be able to get something small once the auctions get going for real. This whole thing is super stupid either way.

The only benefit I'm getting out of this auction is a clean inventory. I'm not taking any part in this game.

Haha I have no chance. I think I have about 300 gems.

Wait, so they changed how it works? Didn't it say the top 100 would win the game previously, where the people bidding less than the top bidder would get the difference back, making some kind of risk/reward thing where you want to be in the top 100 bidders but not actually outbid the top bidder, but now it just seems to go on a 45 minute cycle where the top bidder wins the game? As I'm 95th on the game I've got the best spot to get, this seems incredibly unfeasible for me if the same bid will go on for several days letting people start outbidding the lower biddest after the auction seemed to be done. :/

Steam is turning into Destiny with all of this dumb currency bull honky.

Not a chance. I don't have a single card left, since I sell them all for pennies. It doesn't help that I've never even gotten an emoticon or a background. I don't really care though, I just want the winter sale to get going.

I turned my inventory crap into gems and my gems into steam cash. Zero interest getting involved with Steam's newest social/economy experiment.

Just as a heads up, if you get the high bid on a game, you can no longer cancel it.

Now this is just getting silly.

Space Engineers is currently $9.99 USD. The top bid is 31,000 gems...each stack of gems is selling on the market for $0.97. If converted that's 50% higher than just buying the game for cash, maybe 40-45% after Valve takes their marketplace cut. Come on, people.

Got my first 2 games, Ampu-Tea and Ubersoldier 2. Nothing says unwanted trading cards like a robo-arm tea making sim and a bad russian FPS. :D

People who are complaining about the economy of this might not understand it. In theory there are a limited number of total possible gems (basically the value of every item that can be traded for gems on Steam). Once someone wins an auction those gems are removed from the economy, lowering the total. So while early on bids will be very high, over time the top bid will get lower and lower as fewer and fewer gems remain on the market. At the same time the value of each gem will then increase, meaning if you have too few gems to actually bid on anything I would suggest waiting until later in the auction when the difference between winning and losing an item will be a couple dozen gems not a couple thousand.

Of course players can always get more gems by playing more games and getting more Steam Cards and more badges from those cards and so on, but there are only so many cards you can earn in a day. Even if you have dozens of games with cards left to drop, you need a computer with enough memory to run all of those games at once if you want to farm enough cards for it to make a difference. I currently have five games running at once with two more waiting in the wings. But at the rate of about 10 cards a day I will still end up with under 1000 gems by the end of the auction.

@raven10: I would recommend against that method. I think this whole event is really just catered towards people who were sitting on a stockpile of cards/emoticons/backgrounds. If you don't already have a bunch of those as a result of crafting badges, running games seems like a pretty slow process, given that a lot of cards aren't worth many gems.

Nope. That's really all the opinion I have. Seems like another one of those things where my time is more valuable than even the mildest of effort involved.

Maybe I'm wrong, but the holiday season is upon us and thusly, I aint's gots time fer this shits.

I was pleasantly surprised by the "non tradable" tag, I hope that it makes them less desirable for the traders.

@raven10: Complain about achievements being worthless (XBLA,PSN), complain about giving them worth (Steam/UPlay).

That's why you can't give anyone a compliment anymore.

No chance...everything way too high, utterly pointless roll on the real steam winter sale.

Depends on how deep the Steam crazies go. I have about 1000 gems. I figure about halfway through the auction it might settle down and maybe I'll have a chance at a small game. If not, I can turn those gems into a card pack and move on to the sale.

So, does the winners still get gems back to cover the difference between their bid and what I assume must've been the first bid, or did they remove that thing entirely? Doesn't seem to say that anywhere on the auction page anymore.

No. It is the silliest, most outrageous way to make people use their already pointless cards to try to do something even more pointless. There is no mathematical way I could even approach the bids they have now.

The most expensive game on Steam isn't worth the effort it would take to get any game, and you would certainly not get anything good. Maybe this is for kids who have a bunch of cards and a lot of time.